Horst Boehme

Horst Boehme (24 August 1909-10 April 1945) was a German SS-Oberfuehrer and a leading perpetrator of the Holocaust during World War II.

Biography
Horst Boehme was born in Klingenburg, Saxony, German Empire on 24 August 1909, and he was involved with the Freikorps paramilitary in the aftermath of World War I before joining the Nazi Party and the SS in 1930. In 1934, he became an SS-Obersturmfuehrer, and he became a chief associate of Sicherheitsdienst director Reinhard Heydrich. He rose in the ranks due to Heydrich's favor, and he once personally drowned a German attache in Vienna on Heydrich's orders. In 1939, he became the SiPo chief in the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia, and he closed all Czech institutes of higher learning in 1939 and oversaw reprisals against the civilian population following the murder of Reinhard Heydrich in May 1942. From 1943 to 1944, he served with the Einsatzgruppen death squads in the Soviet Union, and he ended the war as commander of the Security Police and SD in East Prussia. On 10 April 1945, he committed suicide during the Battle of Koenigsberg rather than fall into Soviet hands.